Charles K. Kao and other telecommunication pioneers

On 12 December 1901, the first transatlantic radio communication was made by Guglielmo Marconi from the Poldhu Wireless Station (the transmitter was designed by his scientific advisor, Professor Sir John Ambrose Fleming, also the inventor of the thermionic [or Fleming] Valve in 1904) in Cornwall, United Kingdom, to a temporary receiving station on Signal Hill, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. Several years later, Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics 'in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy.'